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Munchies

Dressed for success

I never liked salad. I know it's healthy. I get that it's part of a balanced diet. I've seen enough "Popeye" cartoons to understand it has the power to make my biceps instantly flex. And, like most Missoulians, I too spend my summer Saturdays walking the rows at the farmers markets and loading up on locally grown leafy greens and veggies. I eat salad, but it's never really been my thing.

I've always been more of a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy. If I ate a side salad before a meal, it was an afterthought. Even when I felt particularly guilty about my gluttony and wandered over to the Good Food Store salad bar, I still ended up piling on enough cubes of turkey and chicken and salami and shredded cheese to insult the notion that I was eating "salad."

This all changed a few years back, during a sweltering southwestern Montana summer, when salad became my family's go-to meal. Our crew craved something crisp, light and refreshing, and I longed for some element of the salad that would get me halfway excited about actually eating it. The solution: homemade dressing.

Like last month's column on dips and sauces, my basic theory here is that a scratch dressing makes everything infinitely better, from greens pulled straight out of the garden to that rubbery spinach in a pre-packaged bag we're sometimes forced to buy. Just as importantly, these three fruit-based recipes are easy and quick to whip up, making store-bought options even less appealing.

click to enlarge

photo by Cathrine L. Walters

I still may put too much bacon on my salad and appeal for firing up the grill rather than picking through the garden, but these recipes have achieved a once impossible feat—they make me eager to eat greens.